Iron & Wine dips into river imagery on new album, 'Kiss Each Other Clean'

First it was art, which gave way to a musical career that today yields “Kiss Each Other Clean” (Warner Bros.), Iron & Wine’s fourth full-length album. (Listen to the record here.)

It’s a lusher affair than its predecessors, full of polyrhythmic songs with R&B-style horns, analogue synthesizers and the murmuring vocals that were a centerpiece of Beam’s ghostly, spare first two albums.

“Kiss Each Other Clean” is a thematic record, too: Beam chose songs with river imagery from a stockpile of tunes he’s written over the past 15 years.

“It’s like the classic metaphor for life. It’s a religious image, or a destructive image or whatever you want to use it as,” Beam says backstage before a recent taping for WNYC in New York. “It came up in a bunch of different tunes, so I thought it would be fun to tie stuff together, push it in different directions. The Beatles showed with ‘Sgt. Pepper’s’ that you can make an album out of anything, just make it seem like it’s connected.”

Making the album, the band’s first since “The Shepherd’s Dog” in 2007, took about nine months of stop-and-start work. Beam says he emphasizes editing and revision over the initial inspiration: “It’s fun to put new clothes on them and see how they hold up,” he says.

The trick, of course, is knowing when to stop tinkering.

“When you get sick of it, or you run out of time,” Beam says, with a laugh. “It’s like sanding. You can sand something forever. You can keep working on it. All the arts are like that: there’s no magical finish line. You get sick of working on it or you walk away.”

Although he’s written songs that sometimes sound confessional, Beam approaches songwriting more as an observer, tying together images to create just enough of a narrative to move the song from verse to verse.

“I don’t write Plastic Ono Band stuff, though I love that record,” he says. “But it’s not therapy for me. I have a certain amount of creative energy, and it used to go painting. Now most of it goes to music. I like to make things. I treat the songs more like poems than prose, so in that sense, I don’t really have a point to make. I just try to be surprised.”